... on Acer Aspire One to add more fun. Yes, on the Acer Aspire One, I have no means to compile, with all hopes of GCC thwarted by the draconian schemes of archaic Linux package managers, all slowly drowning in dependency hell. But enough fantasising --
No GCC, no kernel sources (which are presumably highly customised for the hardware), so no extra kernel modules. This means bridging as well as filtering are out the window, since I lack bridge.ko, tun.ko, and ipt_wtf.ko (though interestingly enough I found tun.ko that someone had precompiled for the AAO). And yet, I need to get QEMU to PXE boot Plan 9 and then use the local Ken FS server for root filesystem. The key was a different style of networking here - the pcap[1] device. It uses the host system's device directly, so if I want to PXE boot Plan 9 inside QEMU, I have to 'ifconfig ath0 0.0.0.0' first, but it works. The way around that would be to use a different MAC address for the emulated device, which is possible with plain ether- net NIC, and with certain wireless config- urations too, but ath0 won't allow it for some reason. So, QEMU starts up[2], PXE boots Plan 9, which gets to the "root is from (tcp, il) [il]:" prompt just fine, and subsequently the user and password queries - all of this goes by fine, and indicates network connectivity with the CPU/auth server, but suddenly everything kernel panics, I presume at the time of making the connection with the Ken FS server (scrolls by too fast for me to see the initial error message). If anyone has any experience or ideas regarding that, I'd love to hear it. Best, ak P.S.: I had to statically compile QEMU with the pcap patch[1] on a mate's machine, long distance, and copy the binary back. Version 0.9.1. No SDL, for it's a bitch to statically compile, thus have to use VNC to see output. [1] http://qemu-forum.ipi.fi/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1568 pcap patch for those curious or interested [2] QEMU startup command: sudo ./qemu -L bios -option-rom bios/pxe-rtl8139.bin \ -boot n -net nic,model=rtl8139,macaddr=00:22:68:C3:4C:08 \ -net pcap,devicename=ath0 -no-kqemu -soundhw sb16 \ -localtime -no-acpi -vnc :1 (yes, sudo: this is Linux, we have rules... and a dictatorship to defeat their purpose)
